I was trying to think on the history of this feature, since i wouldn’t necessarily count something like AvP’s heatvision mode. That’s meant to simulate a real thing, even if it works a bit gamey, by highlighting active objects.
Assassin’s Creed is the game that, for me, codified the mechanic into it’s current form. Hawk Vision or whatever they called it specifically highlighted game objects. I think they even mention that the animus machine is projecting that view to help Desmond see the world how his ancestors would have understood it.
But… I’m going to call the origin as being way farther back. In flight sims, your targeting hud can highlight enemies and targets by drawing little boxes around them. That is the very first instance I can think of where a game highlighted objects of interest for the player’s benefit. Most flight sims (or adjacent genres like mech sims) would also label the box with the name of the thing, sometimes with health, ammo, weapon, or weakpoint indicators as well.
Assassin’s Creed also came to mind for me as one of the first time I encountered this. Eagle Vision I believe it was called.
I’d say that was different from target indicators, though. I feel those were more because distant targets weren’t really visible because of the low resolution at the time, whereas Eagle Vision was more highlighting particular items of interest in the environment that were still otherwise visible.
That’s different. The detective mode is actually useful for when you have to clear a room. It’s so good that some of the last and hardest enemies in the game are not visible while using it.
The only game where I ever found this to be cool, is the one where you literally do that to see because you’re playing as something that has no eyes and has to use echolocation.
omg I just wrote a comment about a student project with this mechanic, wishing to see it in a full production and then scrolled down and here you are telling me that game actually exists! Thank you 😁
I like the way Ghost of Tsushima handled open world navigation with their wind system. Instead of a big GPS line or whatever that takes away from the game, the wind blows in the direction of where you’re going. Very subtle and works narratively while still being able to find where you’re going easily by just observing the world around you.
It did that in a myriad of ways too, not even just the wind. Foxes take you to shrines, there are flocks of birds that indicate haiku spots, and golden parrots that lead you to pretty much any of the POIs you have not yet found. There is even an outfit that comes with a firefly that glows when you’re nearby certain rare items.
Does holding Alt in Baldur’s Gate 3 fall under this? It doesn’t have any kind of visual effect, but I do often find myself needing to use it to see what can be picked up or interacted with in the area.
I actually love this in videogames. It’s a really cool way to interact with the environment and literally see the world through a different lense with a level of control that no other medium of storytelling can achieve.
Maybe this dude should go watch a movie if he doesn’t want to interact with things.
Like most things, there are good and bad implementations and seeing it too frequently can make it become annoying. I love it for things like Alien/Predator style games that are using something from the movies, or maybe a Batman game if used in moderation.
It does get to be tedious when you can only interact with certain objects by using it first and that kind of game play can be annoying. No, I can’t think of an example off the top of my head but I’m certain I’ve run into that kind of thing before.
Dragon Age: Inquisition. I can literally see the thing that I need to loot right there, but I can’t pick it up unless I press the little pingy button first.
I played a student project game a long time ago that based itself around this kind of mechanic. It was a horror game set entirely in the dark, and the only way of seeing was by echolocation - you’d click to send out a pulse, and you’d get brief ghostly glimmers of your environment. Importantly, you couldn’t directly see anything moving - you’d have to send out another ping if you wanted to see something in motion.
Given that monsters could hear your pings too, it was a wonderful little game of cat-and-mouse deduction trying to figure out where monsters were with as few pings as possible, remembering their patrol paths in the dark, and so on. Really cool and I’d love to see that mechanic in a full game production.
(edit: apparently that full game exists, it’s called Perception, and I’m absolutely giving it a shot!)
Oh I remember seeing that in development a while back when I looked up what the BioShock devs were up to. I didn’t realize it released!
Another similar game in my backlog is Vale: Shadow of the Crown. Except instead of having a visual flash, the game relies entirely on audio cues to play and is completely blind-accessible. So completely different, but somehow feels like the same realm.
The first game I remember doing this is The Witcher 2. Not sure if that’s the first game to come up with the idea, but it’s the earliest example I can remember.
The big differences for me in Satisfactory is that you are not pinging resources all the time, it’s a small fractional of the gameplay loop. Also, it doesn’t have a super obnoxious screen effect, so it’s more palatable to me
I like them as well cause they‘re simple, short, and don‘t overshare. Just one purposeful screenshot and some tidbits about the game where you think „good for you, dude,“ drop a like, and move on with your life lol
I always try to contribute something so it’s not just a picture and then me dipping. I’ll usually talk about what I did in the game, and if I can’t do that then I’ll give a review of the game or just talk about it
I look forward to these with every refresh of my Lemmy feed. I don’t want an endless loop of “news”. I just like hearing from normal people enjoying games.
I get that the content isn’t for everyone, but could always block OP or just keyword filter depending on what frontend/app you use to hide the content if you don’t want to see it.
I don’t like how everyone’s initial reaction is to tell people to just block everything they don’t like. Isn’t that exactly how you create an echo chamber?
Depends. Echo chambers are also created by upvote/downvote ratios. If the majority are upvoting a lot of content you have no interest in, filtering that content is also a way to avoid an echo chamber from dominating your feed.
I browse a lot by Everything because my limited list of subscribed communities don’t yet publish enough content to really fill a day’s worth of browsing, so there are a lot of things I’ve blocked just because it’s not interesting to me, or if I am not really the intended audience (e.g. a lot of sports communities for teams I don’t follow, german-speaking communities from feddit.org, etc).
I don’t often have to resort to blocking specific users, but there’s a very small handful of names who post a large volume of content I want to filter but also don’t use consistent communities or keywords that I can cleanly filter instead.
Earliest game I can think of would be Super Metroid, with it’s X-Ray Scanner, which is an upgrade you get partway through the game. It’s not 100% necessary, but some of the game’s secrets are designed with it in mind.
The Metroid Prime games implemented an FPS version of this pretty well. Really contributed to the atmosphere in some places. Also, while the visors let you see otherwise invisible things, they also made other things harder to see (or, in the case of the scanning visor, you couldn’t shoot while it was on.)
Super Metroid’s X-Ray is so cumbersome to use, I played it again recently and just wished for something like the tweet complained about.
But you’re right, it’s not needed, not even on the first playthrough, as no key item is hidden in such a fashion in the game. Interestingly, sometimes it doesn’t even do anything, like when your path is only visually blocked by foreground.
Unfortunately, I was playing the Super Metroid / Link to the Past randomizer and had forgotten some locations, so I did have to use it every now and then.
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